Cairo

David Degner is a Cairo-based freelance photographer represented by Getty Reportage and the
co-editor of the Egyptian photo story magazine, Panorama by Mada Masr

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CAIRO EGYPT – May 10: A few thousand supporters of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi attend a rally for the candidate at the Cairo International Convention and Exhibition Center CAIRO, EGYPT on May 10. Sisi’s Presidential Campaign.

Naji Mansour Mother Jones

4/23/10 -Cairo, Egypt, Muhammad Fati, 22, runs and drops from a ledge to a small walkway below. Inside Cairo the traceurs must negotiate permission with bowabs and dodge constant traffic so their best location is an abandoned government building on the outskirts. Every friday the group rides out to the last metro stop and takes microbuses to converge on the dusty abandoned complex in 15 Mayo. A growing group of youth are organizing into parkour groups in the suburbs of Cairo. Parkour migrated to Egypt without any direct contact but through movies such as District 13 and homemade YouTube videos from around the world. Egypt was the second middle eastern country to form a parkour group in 2008 and since then has grown to more than 50 members with practices 6 days of the week in 3 areas around Cairo, and even a satellite group in Alexandria. Inside Cairo they must negotiate permision with bowabs and dodge constant traffic so their best location is an abandoned government building in an industrial city on the last metro stop. Parkour is a physical discipline like a martial art with the non-violent goal of being able to run and jump through complex environments quickly.

Dahshur Egypt – November 09: An Egyptian family visiting the pyramids of Dahshur spend more time exploring the new holes that have appeared near them. On the edge of Dahshur Egypt new holes have been made by artifact thieves, digging beside the archeological sites of Sneferu’s Pyramids. These include Sneferu’s Red Pyramid, and Sneferu’s Bent Pyramid. Since the revolution the Egyptian security forces haven’t been guarding archeological sites as much as in the past. Making independent archeological exploration easier.

Ahmed Karika, nicknamed Khashaba, gets ready for an evening as a micman. Ahmed’s younger brother imitates him and will follow him to the same party later in the evening.

Gaza City Gaza – November 22, 2014: On the first day past the ceasefire in Gaza City Gaza on November 22.

Uprising in Bahrain, Essam El-Haddad, Chairman at AGD Arabian Group for Development is also is top foreign policy advisor for the Muslim Brotherhood party.

Cairo Egypt – January 23: Down a side alley of the industrial neighborhood of Bolaq stands a large collection of old doors and decorations. The owner has collected them from around Egypt and sells them to set designers, interior designers, in Egypt and abroad.

In Khartoum’s sister city of Omdurman a group of friends try to troubleshoot why the internet has been so slow lately. Cell phone based internet is surprisingly common and relatively cheap. Sometimes less than 20 cents a day. But it can be painfully slow and unreliable. Instagram Sudan.

MINYA EGYPT – May 26: A photo of Ahmed Abdelfatah, lays on the simple lunch of bread and spices that his mother ate, he was sentenced with the 683 in the governorate of MINYA, EGYPT on May 26.

When Chinese tourists come to Xinjiang the International Grand Bazaar of Xinjiang is the main attraction. It’s a large mall with decorative minarets. Uighurs are hired to dance, sell melons and trinkets to the tourists.

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In an age when video journalism is increasinly paramount and printing is arguably no longer necessary, how do you feel the still image is still pertinent to documentary or news work?

Video journalism serves its purpose and is growing as it is easier to create and distribute, but photos haven’t lost their power in this new environment. A single strong image can be viewed and summarize a situation in seconds. In our fast paced world there will always be a place for the still frame.

Do you think documentary and art photography are important for the development of photo journalism? Is there enough of that going on in Egypt (with the Cairo Image Collective, for example) to create a photographic culture?

As a photojournalist I often steal style from art and commercial photography. We must be aware of their modern visual language in our work to stay relevant and interesting. But even though the internet has broken down barriers it can be impossible to find many documentary or art photo books in Cairo. While in the west you can pick up a thick fashion magazine at almost any store and get inspired by the commercial portraiture it takes conscious effort for photographers to suss out inspiration in Egypt.

A Kid Came to Me

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A kid they marked up down at the Qasr Al Nil police station came to complain to me. (This was what was going on back then, with the April 6th Youth Movement and Kifaya and all of that stuff; and the Brotherhood, too, they were getting it together on the sly, even though, bit by bit, they were starting to get it in the neck: cunts.) A sweet kid and a sissy, a guy could get a hard-on just sitting next to him, who’d been working with me for a while and whose name was Ashraf Bayoumi. They marked him up and he came to my house. The minute I saw him I spat and turned my back. On the 4th of April I’d sent him along to a tiny demonstration whose purpose he didn’t know in Talaat Harb Square, and he was supposed to have reported back to me the same day. He bent and wiped my spittle from the doorstep with his sleeve then threw himself at me smearing his mouth against my brow. Just hear me out, he said. Then he followed me inside and asked for a glass of water.

Cairo, 15 January 1850

[…] Here we are then, in Egypt, the land of the Pharoahs, the land of the Ptolemies, the kingdom of Cleopatra (as they say in the grand style). Here we are, and here we abide, with our heads shaven as clean as your knee, smoking long pipes and drinking our coffee lying on divans. What can I say? How can I write to you about it? I have scarcely recovered from my initial astonishment.

What do you know about how people live in Cairo or Beirut or Riyadh? What bearing does such information have upon your life? We in the West hear about the Middle East all the time, but for most of us it remains unknown and unknowable. More complicated still is that, as I learnt at the weekend, forms like the novel and short story were alien to Arabic culture before the first decade of the 20th century: the genres are, themselves, imports.

A few days after you proposed that I write you this letter, a man was killed, his execution public enough that despite the five thousand miles between us we both could look on. This man, a journalist, had once been captured in Libya, then released, then was captured anew in Syria in 2012, this captivity ending in death. He was American, from New England as I am, he and I earned the same degree from the same university, enough years between us that I did not know him, though we each or both passed years among the low mountains and rising rents of Western Massachusetts, the grave of Emily Dickinson (called back, May 15, 1886) that even if one never bothers to walk behind the hair salon and the Nigerian restaurant to visit it serves as heart, destination of a pilgrimage one imagines.

The video his killers posted online may or may not in fact include the moment of his beheading, but confirms beyond doubt its occurrence. Here, we call the group who killed James Foley ISIS: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria; or Iraq and al-Sham; or simply—months pass and the name grows more ambitious—the Islamic State. We’re told that the caliphate they envision stretches from the coast of Syria to Iraq’s eastern border. I had thought that Foley was taken from an internet café, but an article I just glanced at says something about a car being stopped, how men with Kalashnikovs forced him out of the car. If I were to tell the story in a novel, he would be in an internet café, sending as though it were nothing the story of one land and its wars to another, to a land whose replies are silent until the missile drops out of the sky.